The Trump administration has announced it will dismantle a $368 million deep-ocean monitoring system that provides critical data on the world’s oceans. The decision is sparking alarm among experts that US is taking eyes off the oceans at a dangerous time of record-breaking sea temperatures, an imminent super El Niño and fears a critical system of ocean currents could collapse, ushering in global chaos.

The Ocean Observatories Initiative, or OOI, was set up in 2016 and is made up of around 900 instruments in parts of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans specially designed to withstand the immense pressure and corrosive saltiness of the ocean depths. Moored equipment and underwater gliders continuously collect real-time data allowing scientists to monitor the heath of the ocean, including shifts in ocean chemistry and changes to the powerful currents that shape global weather and climate.

The initiative was supposed to operate for three decades, but on May 21, the National Science Foundation, which funds the system, announced it would be “descoping” the network. Over the next 15 months, “in-water infrastructure” will be removed from arrays off the coasts of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and North Carolina and from the North Atlantic off southeast Greenland, the NSF said in a statement.

The decision “aligns with NSF’s wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio,” Mike England, head of media affairs at NSF, told CNN.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration undoes climate protections and attempts to dismantle and defund climate science, at the same time as it pushes to start mining the deep sea for critical minerals. Scientists have expressed deep concerns that dismantling this ocean monitoring system undermines ocean science at a critical time, reduces US scientific leadership and is abandoning taxpayer-funded equipment already paid for and installed.

A huge area of concern is what the loss of monitoring will mean for our understanding of a crucial network of Atlantic Ocean currents called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC. Scientists have used data from the OOI to help try to map the AMOC’s fate.

A growing body of research suggest the AMOC could be on course to collapse, potentially as early as this century, which would bring catastrophic consequences, including accelerated sea level rise along the US East Coast, a winter deep freeze in Europe and prolonged droughts across a swath of Africa.

At another array set to be dismantled, the Ocean Station Papa in the Gulf of Alaska, autonomous buoys and gliders track aspects of ocean health, including acidity in an area that’s vital for the fishing industry but highly vulnerable to ocean acidification

Meanwhile, in the Pacific Northwest, the dismantling of ocean arrays will have more-immediate impacts to commercial fishing and maritime industries. That’s because the Coastal Endurance Array off the coasts of Washington and Oregon are integrated into other ocean instrumentation in the area, helping to monitor temperature and water oxygen levels.

The Endurance array helps tribal fisherman from the Quinault Indian Nation figure out if there are enough Dungeness crab to catch off the coast, or if the oxygen levels are low enough to cause the crabs to die off or move to other waters, said Jan Newton, an oceanography professor at the University of Washington, who helps maintain the array.